No Farm Background Required

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

As the percentage of those involved in production agriculture decreases over time, more operations are open to hiring candidates without an agriculture background for jobs on the farm. Christian Guffy, partner at The Context Network, believes you don’t always need to have “mud on your boots” to help identify and solve problems in agriculture.

Guffy... "If you really had a prerequisite for employment based on who's on the farm, you immediately in the U S at least are relegated to 1 percent of the workforce in an environment where the ag industry is facing a mounting set of challenges. And immediately, we're going to say, we won't touch 99 percent of the workforce felt like the wrong answer. Now, I say that in the industry over the last, 12, 13 years has really changed on that question. That question's still there in a lot of environments, but people's reaction to it is quite different. Where, where most of the time folks now, if you walk into, especially a multinational, you know, a large client base, a huge majority of the folks that now work there didn't actually grow up on the family farm. And there are pros and cons to that. There needs to be the understanding and, of what it means to have mud on your boots. But there are individuals like myself that I do now have mud on my boots because I'm I've adopted the industry, so I didn't grow up on the farm, but I actually purposefully chose agriculture and have really come to enjoy this space, despite not having the prerequisite of the family farm."

Guffy believes as long as someone is teachable, they can be successful with a career in ag.